Nigel Farage loves talking about Britain.
He talks about British sovereignty. British control. British jobs. British borders. British interests.
He presents himself as the politician who will stand up to the establishment and put Britain first.
So perhaps it is time to ask him an awkward question:
Why is Margaret Thatcher — the woman who helped turn some of Britain’s most important public assets into private property — still his political heroine?
Because Thatcher didn’t merely shrink the state.
She sold it.
And not the odd government department or a few unwanted office buildings.
She sold the family silver.
British Telecom.
British Gas.
British Airways.
British Steel.
British Aerospace.
British Airports Authority.
And, most controversially of all, the water industry.
These were not businesses that Thatcher’s government had created. They were national assets, built up over generations, often with enormous amounts of public money.
And Thatcher’s answer was simple:
Sell them.
The BT privatisation in 1984 was followed by British Gas in 1986 and British Airways in 1987. The water companies were privatised in 1989. Electricity followed under John Major in 1990–91.
The sales brought billions into the Treasury.
And then the money was spent.
That’s the crucial point.
Once you sell an asset, you can spend the proceeds once.
But you have lost the asset forever.
Imagine owning a house worth £500,000. You sell it, put the £500,000 into your bank account and proudly announce that you have improved your finances.
For a while, you have.
But you no longer own the house.
That is essentially what happened with huge chunks of Britain’s economic infrastructure.
And Thatcher’s supporters will immediately object: these were inefficient nationalised industries. Privatisation made them more productive, encouraged investment and introduced competition.
There is truth in that argument.
But it doesn’t answer the bigger question.
Why did Britain have to give up ownership in order to achieve efficiency?
Particularly when we’re talking about natural monopolies.
You can choose which supermarket you use.
You can choose which airline you fly.
You can choose which telephone company you use.
But you cannot normally choose which company owns the water pipes underneath your street.
There isn’t a rival water network waiting to dig up the pavement and offer you a cheaper deal.
That’s why privatised utilities require regulators in the first place.
The great Thatcherite free-market revolution created private monopolies — and then required the state to police them.
Water provides perhaps the most extraordinary example.
In 1989, ten regional water and sewerage companies were sold off. The public effectively ceased to own the infrastructure responsible for supplying one of the most fundamental necessities of human life.
Water.
Not luxury goods.
Not televisions.
Not sports cars.
Water.
And what followed has made the decision increasingly difficult to defend.
Private companies have been able to distribute profits and pay dividends while the public has remained responsible for dealing with the consequences when infrastructure fails.
Britain has subsequently spent years arguing about leaking pipes, sewage discharges, executive pay, dividends, debt and investment.
Supporters of privatisation can argue about the causes.
But one fact remains:
The public no longer owns the companies.
And that matters.
Because Farage’s politics is supposedly about taking back control.
Control from Brussels.
Control from bureaucrats.
Control from distant elites.
Control from multinational corporations.
But what is economic control if you don’t own the infrastructure on which your economy depends?
Imagine Farage standing on a stage waving the Union Jack and declaring that Britain must take back control.
Then imagine asking him:
Who owns Britain’s water companies?
Who owns the electricity networks?
Who owns the infrastructure?
Who receives the profits?
Who makes the investment decisions?
Who ultimately benefits from the assets that previous generations of Britons helped build?
Suddenly the slogan becomes rather less comfortable.
And there is another uncomfortable fact for Thatcher’s admirers.
The “share-owning democracy” promised by privatisation was supposed to turn ordinary Britons into a nation of capitalists.
Millions were encouraged to buy shares.
But shares can be sold.
Ownership can become concentrated.
Institutions can acquire them.
International investors can buy them.
And the individual shareholder who bought a handful of BT or British Gas shares in the 1980s is hardly the same thing as the British public collectively owning the nation’s telecommunications or energy infrastructure.
The language was democratic.
The underlying transformation was capitalist.
Britain moved from public ownership to private ownership.
That was the point.
And Thatcher was unapologetic about it.
Indeed, that was her revolution.
She believed that government owned too much, that markets should play a greater role and that private ownership was fundamentally preferable to state ownership.
She was entitled to believe that.
But let’s stop pretending that the consequences were somehow accidental.
They were the policy.
And this is where Farage’s Thatcher worship becomes so revealing.
Farage has built much of his political identity around opposition to elites.
Yet Thatcher’s economic revolution helped create a Britain in which enormous amounts of wealth and infrastructure sit in private hands.
Farage attacks globalisation.
Yet the logic of privatisation was perfectly compatible with international capital buying British assets.
Farage talks about national sovereignty.
Yet Thatcher transferred ownership of strategic national infrastructure from the public to private shareholders.
Farage says Britain must put itself first.
So why isn’t public ownership of essential British infrastructure part of his great national revival?
Perhaps because Thatcherism and Farageism have more in common than either man would like to admit.
Both are extraordinarily comfortable with the idea that the market should decide who owns things.
Both distrust the state.
Both celebrate private enterprise.
And both can wrap those economic ideas in the Union Jack.
But patriotism isn’t simply waving a flag.
Patriotism can also mean owning the things that make a country work.
The pipes.
The wires.
The railways.
The energy infrastructure.
The communications networks.
The strategic industries.
The assets built by generations of British taxpayers.
That is why the phrase “family silver” is so powerful.
Because the family silver wasn’t worthless.
It was valuable precisely because it was ours.
Thatcher sold much of it.
John Major continued the process.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not reverse the fundamental direction.
And Royal Mail was eventually privatised in 2013 under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
The process crossed party lines because Thatcher had already changed the terms of the argument.
But Thatcher remains the political icon.
Especially for Nigel Farage.
So here’s the challenge to him:
If Britain needs to take back control, perhaps he should start by explaining why his heroine spent so much time selling Britain in the first place.
Because the uncomfortable truth is this:
Margaret Thatcher did not simply make Britain more capitalist.
She made Britain less publicly owned.
She took assets built collectively and placed them in private hands.
She called it freedom.
Her supporters called it enterprise.
Critics called it a sell-off.
And the bill is still arriving.
So the next time Nigel Farage tells us that Margaret Thatcher is the politician he admires most, perhaps we should remember what she actually did.
She didn’t just put Britain on the market.
She put parts of Britain up for sale.
And once the family silver has been sold, no amount of flag-waving can put it back in the cupboard.
